Tecnozombies: artifact beings within contemporary technoscience

Santiago Koval

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to understand how the present and the past interact through the social appropriation of contemporary technology. Specifically, it proposes a route through the major cultural impulses, and the most important philosophical and religious mythical cosmogonies that shaped the development of devices that have been naturalized in recent decades and that constitute now the technical support of our human interactions. Thus, this article attempts to reconcile the scientific developments –particularly, the manner in which we incorporate them to our cultural practices and, therefore, to the way we establish relationships with our body and wºith our reality– and ancient traditions –archaic figures that enable particular conceptions of the body, subjectivity, willpower and consciousness–. Based on this route, we will seek to demonstrate that the social appropriation of our technical devices could be updating ancient impulses concerning a human zombification. Thereby, initially, it could be argued that one of the figures that describes contemporary individuals is that of the tecnozombie or technological zombie, that is, a person that, due to the intimate link that establishes with technology, develops characteristics that approach him to the zombie imaginary.

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